Monday, June 23, 2008

Re-reading Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind"and was struck by how this description of mania was absolutely accurate and pitch-perfect, as if Dr. Jamison had conjured up the ghost of manic episode past as she wrote this passage:

"There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality."

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This is the blog of Jayson Blair, a certified life coach, in Ashburn, Va. who works with people with bipolar disorder, depression, attention deficit disorder, substance abuse issues, motivation problems, career problems and an assortment of other sub-compartments of the meaning, and managing, life. To return to his website or contact Jayson, click here.

Random Quotes

Frank Pembleton, detective, Homicide Life on the Street: "Listen, let me tell you something. We're all guilty of something, cruelty, or greed, or, or going 65 in a 55 mile per hour zone. But you know what? You wanna think about yourself as the fair-haired choir boy? You go AHEAD."

Pembelton: "I'm saying you go a darkness, you, Tim Byliss, you got a darkness inside of you. You gotta know the darker, uglier sides of yourself. You gotta recognize them, so that they're not constantly sneaking up on you. You gotta love 'em, 'cause they're part of you, because along with your virtues, they make you who you are. Virtue isn't virtue unless it slams up against vice. So, consequently, your virtue is not real virtue, until it's been tested ... tempted."

"Well, as usual, its time turn chicken shit into chicken salad" = a journalist colleague on deadline reviewing what the exceptions of us were and what we were working with, and a quote that can be apllied to many other areas of life.

"You know you're in college when: you use the vodka bottles in your freezer as ice packs because you don't have any real ones" - my friend, a dancer, after practice

"For while some of the benefits of psychotherapy may be dubious, it does give us one shining truth. We are shaped by those moments when the sadness of life first wounds us. Yet often we are too young to remember that wounding experience, that decisive point after which all is changed for better or worse." - Howell Raines in "Grady's Gift," an article for The New York Times Magazine

"It's the rescuer personality. I let every stray cat in the door and pick up every wounded dog. I forget sometimes that some are gonna die on me, some are gonna run away, some are gonna stay sick, and some are gonna bite me" - me

"Trouble me. Disturb me - with all your cares and your worries. Speak to me. And let our words build - a shelter from the storm" - Natalie Merchant and the 10,000 Maniacs

"The most deceptive and vexing kind of pain is a comfortable pain, the type of pain that says that the alcohol that hurts us is not as painful as the pain it seems to wash away, and that the man that hits us does not hurt us as much as the thought of being alone." - me

"Intuition is always right in at least two important ways: It is always in response to something. It always has your best interest at heart ... Denial is a save now, pay later scheme." - Gavin deBecker, author of The Gift of Fear

"I just walked into a 'buzz saw' and am now sandpapering down the blades" - me, expressing my containment strategy when something goes wrong (I don't have enough troops for the Powell Doctrine)

"I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated." - Kay Redfield Jamison, PhD, author and psychiatric researcher and professor"If you're going to spend time alone in your head, be sure to bring a flashlight and a gun" - a friend from A.A. making a point about the downside of solo, introspective isolation

"Get off the cross; we need the wood," - a friend from A.A. in response to my whining and turning feeling sorry for myself into both a sport and an art.

"I tell everyone I feel sorry, because I wish I did. I really do. But I feel most sorry for not feeling sorry at all. For that, I truly feel sorry." - a clienton why she felt she had to stop automatically apologizing anytime anyone was critical of her

"Even when I have been most psychotic - delusional, hallucinating, frenzied - I have been aware of finding new corners in my mind and heart. Some of those corners were incredible and beautiful and took my breath away and made me feel as though I could die right then and the images would sustain me. Some of them were grotesque and ugly ... But, always, there were those new corners and ... I cannot imagine becoming jaded to life, because I know those limitless corners, with their limitless views." - Dr. Jamison

"Trust me, projects do not make for good partners," - metoa friend who was upset that her boyfriend seemed dismissive of her thoughts on his family psychopathology

"To those of us with real understanding, dancing is the only pure art form.... To live is to dance, to dance is to live." - Snoppy

"I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"I have loved to the point of madness;That which is called madness,That which to me,Is the only sensible way to love"- Françoise Saganv

"My wiring is not perfect" - my favorite Patricia Cornwell quote.

"You like to believe that the world is full of cute things and well-meaning people."- me

"There would be something even more wrong if you agreed with everyone on anything (with the exception of me, since I Am, the One, the Only, Yahweh, the Morning Star, Elohim, El Shaddi, Adoni, Jehovah-Rohi, etc.) Outside of agreeing with me on everything, it would be strange, developmentally, if you had not come up with values on your own" - me talking to a friend about struggling with feeling like an outsider in her own home as she begins to development differences with her parents on social issues